Steven Kretchmer
Unique designs, tension settings, and a little magic.
How does a Steven Kretchmer ring hold that diamond? Years of science and a little magic are behind Steven Kretchmer's famous and often-copied tension setting. The magic of an authentic Steven Kretchmer tension setting is the 12,000 pounds per square inch integrated fitted mounting that secures your precious gem forever. Tension settings allow the maximum amount of light to penetrate the stone, enhancing its brilliance.
Applying his patented technologies, Steven Kretchmer Jewelry transforms precious metals into unique, elegant, and collectible designer rings, earrings, and necklaces. Steven Kretchmer Jewelry also utilizes innovative metals and features, "polarium," a permanently polarized platinum alloy that acts like a magnet.
Steven Kretchmer's sophisticated and masculine bands are perfect for celebrating everlasting partnership.
Each extraordinary Steven Kretchmer, high end jewelry, setting is for the discerning and unique individual.
Jewelry designer and metalsmithing historian Steven Kretchmer isn't your typical designer. Yes, he holds formal degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Michigan, but Kretchmer's more enriching professional experiences have been laboriously gained through a series of personal quests and tutoring by great masters and metallurgical magicians.
More than any other jewelry designer, Steven Kretchmer seeks to understand the intrinsic role that ancient and modern metals have played in the development of civilization. He deduced that jewelry metalsmithing didn't have much to do with actual life and death situations and has remained in the slow lane, within the tradition of passing the same age-old techniques from father to son, master to apprentice. It's Kretchmer's opinion that jewelry design remained bound by the limitations of those techniques and the use of conventional precious alloys.
Kretchmer's desire to break old boundaries led him to study technique of Mokume Gane-- an ancient Japanese metal patterning technique meaning "wood-grain metal." Kretchmer's passion has led to unique and custom made precious metals, Mokume Gane jewelry, blue gold, and other exotic precious metals. At one point, he researched exotic gold for jewelry design mogul Harry Winston.
Kretchmer's achievements in developing new types of springy precious metals and alloys and in using them in innovative jewelry designs enabled only through their use are a recognized milestone in jewelry design and its contemporary history.
Steven Kretchmer's jewelry designs have won several awards including the 1992 personal award of New Designer of the Year by Jewelers of America. He is best known for his "tension setting" jewelry. This seemingly magical innovation uses no prong or bezel, just one long expanse of shank clasping the stone. This "tension setting" technique results in designs so elegant in their simplicity that they belie the complex processes that go into making them.
